Word: menhaden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Writers of the sea, like war novelists, test their heroes by putting them through an ordeal. In his semi-documentary novel. Gulf Stream North, Author Earl Conrad pits a simple crew of Florida Negroes against schools of unpalatable fish called menhaden, and gives their humble ordeal moments of tragic dignity...
...crew of the Moona Waa Togue, menhaden is known as pogy, and catching pogy (for oils and fertilizer) is the hard work they do from April to November. The fishing day begins at 4 in the morning, when the mate, who tells the story, bangs on the weather-beaten shacks of a Florida port town and rounds up the men; sometimes it ends before dusk, sometimes later. Where the ship hunts for pogy is strictly the business of Captain Crother. a white man who rarely cracks a smile because the Moona Waa Togue is his last stop on a downhill...
...small (about 1 lb.), bony member of the herring family, the menhaden is the U.S.'s No. 1 commercial fish. Unpalatable, menhaden are valuable for oil (soap and paint), stock and poultry feeds, fertilizers. Massachusetts Indians showed the Pilgrims how to use them: plant a menhaden in every hill of corn...
Chaplin learned that there are about 100 songs that "belong to the business." Nobody knows how old the songs are. Among the menhaden fishermen, most of them Negroes from the tidewater South, the chanteys have been handed down from father to son, from crew to crew. Chaplin also learned from the Barnegat's song leader, Walter Kegler of Fernandina, Fla., that menhaden fishermen are picked "almost as much for their music as their muscles." The singing has two functions, Kegler explained: it provides a rhythmic pulse for hauling in the seine, and it is "thanksgiving" for a good haul...
...coast-to-coast hookup last week NBC broadcast what Chaplin had heard. To most listeners, the menhaden fishermen's chants, more religious than piscatorial in flavor, had a good deal in common with the best of Negro "spirituals," but they also had a fresh, saltwater tang all their own. Sample (the Barnegat's favorite chant...